USING TWO-LEVEL MORPHOLOGY TO TRANSCRIBE SWEDISH NAMES
Joakim Gustafson
Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics, KTH, Stockholm,Sweden
Abstract
Names are difficult to handle for normal letter-to-sound rules,
since these usually are designed for ordinary words. The structure
of Swedish names differ from ordinary words - but their multi-morphemic
structure make them suitable to analyse with a morphological analyser.
The paper presents the work on names from the Swedish telephone
directory, as part of the ONOMASTICA project [7], including a
brief study of the structure of Swedish names. The speech communication
group at KTH have developed a system where a morphology analyser
is used together with a set of rules to transcribe ordinary Swedish
words. This paper will describe the work done to extend this system
to cope with names as well.
The paper shows that the approach of transcribing Swedish names
with the Two-level Morphology analyser (TWOL) is appropriate.